y treacherous to her and
to her mother, in disgust and alarm left the room without receiving a
letter he had brought her from Maria Theresa, and without deigning to
address a single word to him. In the heat of her passion and resentment,
she was nearly exposing all she knew of his infamies to the King, when
the coolheaded Princesse Elizabeth opposed her, from the seeming
imprudence of such an abrupt discovery; alleging that it might cause an
open rupture between the two Courts, as it had already been the source of
a reserve and coolness, which had not yet been explained. The Queen was
determined never more to commit herself by seeing the Cardinal. She
accordingly sent for her mother's letter, which he himself delivered into
the hands of her confidential messenger, who advised the Queen not to
betray the Cardinal to the King, lest, in so doing, she should never be
able to guard herself against the domestic spies, by whom, perhaps, she
was even yet surrounded! The Cardinal, conceiving, from the impunity of
his conduct, that he still held the Queen in check, through the influence
of her fears of his disclosing her weakness upon the subject of the
obstruction she threw in the way of her sister's marriage, did not resign
the hope of converting that ascendency to his future profit.

"The fatal silence to which Her Majesty was thus unfortunately advised I
regret from the bottom of my soul! All the successive vile plots of the
Cardinal against the peace and reputation of the Queen may be attributed
to this ill-judged prudence! Though it resulted from an honest desire of
screening Her Majesty from the resentment or revenge to which she might
have subjected herself from this villain, who had already injured her in
her own estimation for having been credulous enough to have listened to
him, yet from this circumstance it is that the Prince de Rohan built the
foundation of all the after frauds and machinations with which he
blackened the character and destroyed the comfort of his illustrious
victim. It is obvious that a mere exclusion from Court was too mild a
punishment for such offences, and it was but too natural that such a mind
as his, driven from the royal presence, and, of course, from all the
noble societies to which it led (the anti-Court party excepted), should
brood over the means of inveigling the Queen into a consent for his
reappearance before her and the gay world, which was his only element,
and if her favour s